The Cold and Forbidding Worlds of Cynthia Ozick

You know you’re in a Cynthia Ozick short story when the wind is merciless and the leaves have dropped. It may already be snowing. In “Bloodshed,” we are greeted by the “icy scenes” that a gun-toting rationalist sees from a Greyhound bus on his way to a “town of the hasidim” outside New York City, where he is ultimately shamed and disarmed by a local rebbe. In “The Biographer’s Hat,” snowflakes adorn the fur collar of a crooked biographer who mouches off a proofreader and persuades her to falsely insert herself into his subject’s history. “A Mercenary” concludes with the haunting vision of a man lying dead “under the stone-white hanging stars of Poland…. Against the stones and under the snow.”